Preparing for Culturally Responsive Schooling: Initial Teacher Educators Into the Fray

In Australia, schools are experiencing increasing cultural diversity, alongside of nationalizing assessment and curricular and professional standards. It is raising concerns regarding the pace of systemic reform and sector wide professional renewal. Culturally responsive schooling practices may be helpful at this time because it locates the experiences of learners as powerfully influencing engagement and achievement. This article reports on “The culturally responsive schooling project,” a study focused on postgraduate students as they prepared for, undertook, and reflected on practicum experiences. Participants identified three barriers that impacted on their culturally responsive efforts: mentors encouraging limited and limiting curricula, pedagogic and assessment practices; mentors communicating resistance to doing things differently or valuing cultural responsiveness; and a fearful awareness of being evaluated by their mentors. The ambition of this discussion then is to encourage a rethink of the interconnections between teacher education, school leadership, and inservice professional development.

Culture in Schooling in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region

We describe research on Inuvialuit culture in schooling in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the northwestern Northwest Territories in Arctic Canada. A mixed-methods case study using questionnaires in the region’s six communities explored students’, parents,’ and high school teachers’ perspectives on Inuvialuit culture in the schools. While students and parents were pleased that local culture is reflected in the schools, most would like to see more Inuvialuit culture become part of schooling. Teachers would like to know more about Inuvialuit culture and history and would like professional development to help them teach Inuvialuit students more effectively. This research suggests that policy in the Northwest Territories to move towards culturally responsive schooling is yet to be fully embodied. It should be prioritized.

Critical Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy and Indigenous Education Sovereignty

In this article, Teresa L. McCarty and Tiffany S. Lee present critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy as a necessary concept to understand and guide educational practices for Native American learners. Premising their discussion on the fundamental role of tribal sovereignty in Native American schooling, the authors underscore and extend lessons from Indigenous culturally based, culturally relevant, and culturally responsive schooling. Drawing on Paris's (2012) and Paris and Alim's (2014) notion of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), McCarty and Lee argue that given the current linguistic, cultural, and educational realities of Native American communities, CSP in these settings must also be understood as culturally revitalizing pedagogy. Using two ethnographic cases as their foundation, they explore what culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy (CSRP) looks like in these settings and consider its possibilities, tensions, and constraints. They highlight the ways in which implementing CSRP necessitates an “inward gaze” (Paris & Alim, 2014), whereby colonizing influences are confronted as a crucial component of language and culture reclamation. Based on this analysis, they advocate for community-based educational accountability that is rooted in Indigenous education sovereignty.

Culturally Responsive Schooling for Indigenous Youth: A Review of the Literature

This article reviews the literature on culturally responsive schooling (CRS) for Indigenous youth with an eye toward how we might provide more equitable and culturally responsive education within the current context of standardization and accountability. Although CRS for Indigenous youth has been advocated for over the past 40 years, schools and classrooms are failing to meet the needs of Indigenous students. The authors suggest that although the plethora of writing on CRS reviewed here is insightful, it has had little impact on what teachers do because it is too easily reduced to essentializations, meaningless generalizations, or trivial anecdotes—none of which result in systemic, institutional, or lasting changes to schools serving Indigenous youth. The authors argue for a more central and explicit focus on sovereignty and self-determination, racism, and Indigenous epistemologies in future work on CRS for Indigenous youth.